The Khronos vision working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms.

The Khronos vision API will be able to accelerate high-level libraries, such as the OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. The vision API will also explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.

The working group's task is enable computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enable acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs.

“Computer vision will be central to enabling consumers to use and interact with their computing devices in compelling and magical ways - but this emerging market opportunity needs a firm foundation of cross-platform vision acceleration,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, in a statement.

Interested companies can join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.